Our View: A plan for ‘economic suicide’

Published: Monday, June 9, 2014 at 09:15 AM.

By then, of course, somebody else will be president. That gives us reason to hope these regulations won’t be around much longer. The next president could scuttle them. So could a Republican-controlled Congress. Or state governors could simply ignore the EPA mandates. “If a state declines to develop a (pollution reduction) plan, the EPA can create one itself,” The Associated Press reported. “But how the EPA could force a state to comply with that plan remains murky.”

For Florida, there’s bad news and good news in President Obama’s plan to order huge cuts in carbon dioxide emissions at U.S. power plants. The bad news is that Florida is supposed to reduce its emissions by 38 percent, far above the nationwide goal of 30 percent.

The good news is … well, the good news is that the bad news could’ve been worse. New York faces a targeted reduction of 44 percent.

If you’re wondering why we shouldn’t celebrate a pending cutback in pollution, it’s because this cutback comes at an enormous economic cost. Converting plants to cleaner power generation, closing older plants and transitioning to alternative energy sources are likely to kill jobs and drive up customers’ power bills.

Associated Industries of Florida voiced that concern in a news release issued immediately after the Environmental Protection Agency was assigned the power-plant crackdown. “AIF and its members oppose the new proposed standards that the EPA would like to place on existing power plants,” the organization said. “These new regulations will weigh down businesses and make it more difficult for them to expand here in Florida and across the nation.”

The free-market Americans for Limited Government was more blunt. It called the pollution cuts “nothing less than an economic suicide pact.”

The cuts are intended to scale back the greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming. The EPA expects to give “customized” cutback targets to individual states, then let the states figure out how to meet their goals. Some states (Kentucky: 18 percent) have relatively modest targets. Others, like Florida, face stiffer challenges.

The aim nationwide is to reach these targets by 2030.

By then, of course, somebody else will be president. That gives us reason to hope these regulations won’t be around much longer. The next president could scuttle them. So could a Republican-controlled Congress. Or state governors could simply ignore the EPA mandates.
“If a state declines to develop a (pollution reduction) plan, the EPA can create one itself,” The Associated Press reported. “But how the EPA could force a state to comply with that plan remains murky.”

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